Hatching

Spinning, spinning, lost inside a dervish of my own devising, questioning reality while living every moment of it, curled up in the pain of a future unavoidable and so much wanted and so feared. Nothing that I do gets recorded in my life, it's just an empty slate, a blank that I can't fill, no matter how much I write on it. I could kill someone, I think, and cause no ripples in the universe, because my actions don't exist, because my soul is dead and numb and terribly, terribly alive.

I Could Get Sick Of This

I could get sick of lying in bed, staring blankly at the wall, feeling nothing but this aching emptiness. I wish my life right now, right here, was all I ever needed. I am getting sick of trying to find more. I want this moment to satisfy me, but nothing ever does. The numbness, the sadness permeates everything, even the most beautiful sunny day. I wish to God I could escape.

Growing Up

I used to think I knew everything. Now I know I don't know everything, which I suppose actually puts me much closer to knowing everything than I was before. The knowledge of our lack of knowledge frees us, gives us power. It's when we have to pretend we understand that we display our own ignorance.

I'm sad today, but without a good reason. It's just the sort of sadness that lies on me like a blanket. If I tried hard enough I could throw it off and get up. I just don't do so because I want someone else to come along and lift it off me themselves. I want someone else to do the work, because that is what makes me think that they love me--their willingness to take away my pain.

In one sense I find that an incredibly selfish thought. But on the other hand, if we never let anyone do anything to help us, how can they really love us? Maybe letting someone else take away my pain is letting them love me. Maybe the only time it's selfishness is when I want to manipulate them into doing it, without telling them it's what I need.

I'm defragmenting the church's hard drive right now, which leaves me without much else to do. The computer has been crashing all morning, having fatal errors and displaying blue screens of death. The asian students are practicing for their recitals, filling the church with trills and scales and the chorus of chanting male and female voices mixing and harmonizing and then separating themselves and plunging upward or down, depending on the gender. Ocasionally the director yells something. Ocassionally they clap or laugh.

Somehow they remind me of The Ron Clark Story, which I watched yesterday, and which in turn reminded me of how much I still wish I could be an angry kid in an unruly classroom. I miss those days in Acadia when I told everyone exactly how I felt and what I thought, when I swore and fought and threw things. It would be so much easier to still be that way, to honestly not care, to make someone else do all the relational work. I was trying to figure out why getting to know someone, anyone, now is so much harder than it was back when I was getting to know Bill, and I realized this: Back then I was a secret to be discovered, a mystery to be revealed, a wound to be wrapped up, and I gave nothing back. I took everything and ran with it and somehow knew I would be followed.

Yes, Bill says, yes. All you had to do was show up.

I wanted to be a mystery then. Now I want to be totally known, to have no secrets. It's much easier when you can start out with what you want--the mystery--than when what you want is the final destination--to be totally known. Then, I had it from the beginning. Now, I will have to work for years.

It's the easiest path possible to be a selfish child and take everything. I guess that's why we're born that way and have to spend the rest of our lives learning how to change.

The High Functioning Ones

Every little thing turns into such an ordeal. It's quite amusing, actually. When something really big actually does come along, it levels us. But until then we just think we're leveled. It's the difference between standing on a rooftop and saying, "I want to jump off," and actually jumping off. People who stand there and say they want to, don't. The people who want to just do it.

So those of us who are sane enough to know we're crazy are not really crazy. And those of us who are hopeful enough to admit we're suicidal are not really ready to die. If we really wanted to die, we would just get on with it. We want the pain to stop, we might do something really stupid in order to try to make it stop, but we don't actually want to die.

I say this not because I am in any way suicidal right now. I'm feeling really well. I'm just noticing it in you, not for the first time ever, but for the first time with real comprehension, and I want to say this: Don't let it get you.

It's strange and yet not strange how those of us who are not actually insane wish we were because that would make things so much simpler. We think it's a burden that we are "high functioning," that we can get out of bed and take a shower and get in a car and drive to work and make it home again before bedtime. We think it's a burden that we can have sex and actually love the person we're having sex with. We think it's a burden that we have a life, but that is the feeling in and of itself that lets us know we have a life worth living, we have hope.

Don't think I'm a hypocrite when I say this. I'm one of those "high functioning" ones. I too live with the knowledge that any day the hammer could fall and I could lose it again, like you have. It's just something that's there. But it doesn't make us crazy. And it won't kill us.

You will not actually kill yourself. I know you say you want to right now and I believe that you do, but you won't, not actually. I know you won't because you know what you have. It's hopelessness that makes us jump. Agony we can endure. The thought of it never ever ever ever ending is what makes it unbearable. As long as you know it will end--even if you think you don't know it right now, you do--you will keep fighting. You will fight because you are healthy enough to know you are sick.

The pain will end. It will. It really, really will. I promise.

Happy Mother's Day, World

I really just wanted a long hug today, but somehow I never got one. I really just wanted someone to sit down with me in quite and look me in the eye and say, "How are you?" but I would have had to ask for that, and I didn't think of it. I am so tired, so tired. I have absolutely no idea what tomorrow holds, only that I want to run away from it as fast as I can. The possibilities are endless, but I'm almost too tired to worry about them. I want to throw myself wide open, be free, be that unknown person called myself, but I'm afraid, even though I know fear is the worst thing I can feel and the emotion most likely to drive others away. People smell fear. They smell neediness too. They despise both. Confidence, that is what makes this world go round, and it makes me sad.

I would like one gift, God. This is what I would like: A best friend to hold me for the rest of my life. A friend I am free to love with body as well as emotions. A friend totally mine, to possess and caress and cherish.

I ask this without much faith. You understand this, don't you? Of course you do. You made the head I'm thinking with. You know I want to believe you will give me the desires of my heart, but you know I don't actually believe it. Please forgive me. I don't know how to believe. I only know I am unfinished, incomplete, and there is no amount of striving on my part that will change that.

Stuck On Myself

It's Mother's Day. The praise team is warming up and I'm running through my lyrics. I couldn't sleep last night, hardly at all, yet I'm not sleepy. I'm wired in a way I don't understand. Perhaps the past few weeks of lethargy are turning around. Be yourself, everyone says, just be yourself. But who am I, exactly? Who is it I should be being? Anna is a composite of a dozen different people. Sometimes I think she doesn't ever have a thought that's really her own. I watch her from the outside even as I am inside her and she scares me, because I know I'm stuck with her for the rest of my life and I can't imagine anyone else wanting to be stuck that way. I know how to find fathers, I know how to find mothers. I know how to find sisters and brothers. But I don't know how to find lovers.

I Think You Are

I think you are a dream,
something I've created.
I think you are a memory
that never really happened.

I think you are the ghost
of someone never born,
and I feel as if you've slipped away
without ever being here.

I think you are a cocktail
made up of just one thing,
and the silence that you've left me in
is turning deafening.

My Rollercoaster

Sometimes I think the craziness itself is what makes me crazy; the trying to sort out what is real inside my head and what is not makes me want to jump off a bridge (not literally, for all you worrywarts). I spent the day on an emotional rollercoaster that went from groggy and depressed in the morning to jittery and obsessed in the afternoon to desperate and angry in the evening and finally to hopeless and resigned right now.

Finally around six this evening I got in my car and drove to a parking lot and curled up in the backseat for awhile, just to get out of my apartment because I felt like I was going to start screaming. I wanted to make everyone else pay for how bad I felt, and I wanted to make myself pay for feeling so manipulative. What a nice mess. Now it's past ten and I need to get my butt to bed or I will be even more miserable in the morning.

The thing is, when I stand back and survey my life, everything is going fine. I should be able to take my hands off the wheel and coast. Instead I am mired in both trying to be okay and trying to appear ok at the same time. I no longer know where I want to be or what I want to be doing. Every time I go somewhere, I get stuck thinking about the places where I'm not.

Just once, I would like this ride to stop. I would like to get off this rollercoaster and stand to the side and watch it race off into the distance without me on board. Just once, I would like to be standing still and upright, instead of flying backwards while hanging upside down.

Here's The Trick

Always assume the best. Do not take anything personally. Look at all the scenarios and pick the nicest one possible. Give him the benefit of the doubt.

If you're wrong, you can always still flip out later.

Me At The Arboretum

Yes, there must have been something very interesting down there...

And there...

And there...

Oh, I actually can look up--

And smile!